“[Keith Ekiss’s] poems create a bold and intense landscape. In deft, musical language they persuade the reader that the history of the land is almost always a personal history.”
Eavan boland
Up and Down Picacho Peak
Hunter trail, I walk the path
named for the Confederate Captain
who burned haystacks to starve Union horses.
Blue lupine guards the way, globe mallows
beneath my feet map the landscape's
vastness: both sides were lost,
hadn't meant to skirmish. If they almost died
of thirst, there were too many reminders
of water: palo verde swim in yellow and bees,
the peak curls like a wave about to break.
An easy climb, straight up through granite cliffs,
unlike this history. Slaves the territory
sought as soldiers to flush out Apache,
and keep the mines humming. I reach
the summit quickly, scenery and scent:
ploughed cotton fields, dead volcanoes.
I turn my back on the freeway. The better idea
of the West, arroyos toward the Sawtooth
range, no roads find it- beauty like stillness,
though it never lacks thorn and edge.
On the way down, I skip the marked trail,
drift along the ridge: the animal spine of it,
the broken back of it. Switchbacking starling
nearly spears my hair. I chimney lower,
careful for pincushion needles, thinking
as I lose my way slowly: hard to believe
they fought for this, shins cut, shaken
into laughter, already full of the story.
first published in Superstition Review
Pima Road Notebook 1
My mother’s voice echoed me nearer toward home.
Sad quail in the brush, searching for her children.
Her stain glass hobbies, her knotted macramé.
Bougainvillea papering the window, blood light.
Jackrabbit in summer, beating white heart.
A pheasant blown off-course into plate glass.
The vulture hopped as it ate, puppet-like.
The temperature of silence was always rising.
I could hear the needle of the palo verde drop.
She talked on the phone and hung up the phone.
I was left to wandering the saltbrush.
In desert light, in thirsty light, out past the houses.
Out past the idea of roads toward the dry wash.
Her medicine cabinet a cave of tints and scents.
I twisted her lipstick, the spiral a tendril.
Smelled the sweet clay of Sunset Red emollient.
Who broke the necklace of the river?
I straightened my dive through the infertile water.
Blue relief, our chlorinated swimming pool.
first published in Blackbird